Reading, listening to, and questioning America... from the southern Great Plains

Santorum's obsession(s)

Charles Blow, at the New York Times, goes back to an emblematic speech Rick Santorum gave in '08, a speech followed by Q & A. In his answers to every question asked at Washington's Oxford Center for Religion and Public Life, he brought the subject back to sex.

In response to a question about the kinds of words he had heard “attached to religion and politics” during his years in the Senate, Santorum ventured off onto sex:

“It comes down to sex. That’s what it’s all about. It comes down to freedom, and it comes down to sex. If you have anything to do with any of the sexual issues, and if you are on the wrong side of being able to do all of the sexual freedoms you want, you are a bad guy. And you’re dangerous because you are going to limit my freedom in an area that’s the most central to me. And that’s the way it’s looked at.”

Next a commenter falsely claimed that my colleague Maureen Dowd “said that the Republican Party is trying to repeal Woodstock.” It was a misrepresentation of a 1998 column she had written about the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal. What she actually wrote was:

“Since Watergate, there has been a pendulum of partisan revenge. And, right now, Republicans want their payback for Watergate, for Bork, for Iran-contra, even for Woodstock. Like Kenneth Starr, the Republicans are attempting to repeal the 1960s.”

But let’s not let facts slow us down. Santorum, predictably, deflected back to sex:

“Woodstock is the great American orgy. This is who the Democratic Party has become. They have become the party of Woodstock. They prey upon our most basic primal lusts, and that’s sex. And the whole abortion culture, it’s not about life. It’s about sexual freedom. That’s what it’s about. Homosexuality. It’s about sexual freedom. All of the things are about sexual freedom, and they hate to be called on them. They try to somehow or other tie this to the founding fathers’ vision of liberty, which is bizarre. It’s ridiculous. That’s at the core of why you are attacked.” ...NYT

But wait. Isn't this really about power/money? About social acceptance? About whether you're "successful" or not? About envy?

“What changed was the ’60s. What changed was sex. What changed was the social and cultural issues that have huge amounts of money because if you look — I haven’t seen numbers on this, but I’m sure it’s true — if you go socioeconomic scale, the higher the income, the more socially liberal you are. The more you know you can buy your way out of the problems that sexual libertinism causes you. You have an abortion, well, I have the money to take care of it. If I want to live an extravagant life and get diseases, I can. ... You can always take care of everything. If you have money, you can get away with things that if you’re poor you can’t.” ...NYT

Rick Santorum's session at the Oxford Center may have been about fear even more than about sex.

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Dana Milbank sees sexual (or is it gender?) obsession, too. Not just in Rick Santorum but in the entire Republican party.

March is federally recognized as Women’s History Month, and Republicans have been celebrating the occasion in a most unusual style: with a burst of interest in women’s private parts. ...WaPo

In Virginia (giggle) and all the way to Washington, it's about Blunting birth control, giving a fetus civil rights, tripping on Transvaginal Airlines, and Rush Limbaugh's potty-mouth rant.

Sheesh! It even turns up in Oklahoma, though in Oklahoma they at least have a sense of humor.

On Tuesday, Oklahomans held a protest at the state capitol to oppose a bill, passed by the state Senate and now being taken up by the House, that would bestow “personhood” on fetuses — one of many such efforts across the nation. Democrat Judy McIntyre, one of just four women in the 48-member state Senate, was so upset that, according to the Oklahoman newspaper, she held a protest sign proclaiming: “If I wanted the government in my womb, I’d [expletive] a senator.” ...WaPo

What's left of sanity in the Republican party (and they have a tenuous hold on sanity, at best) lies with Mitch McConnell and Mitt Romney who did their best to skirt the issue. And, of course, it's all the fault of the White House for being unkind to the Catholic church.